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I'm not actually blaming Woke, for the record-- that's why I put that whole spiel about this NOT being a conspiracy. But I am convinced this is very much a supply issue, not a demand issue-- I stopped pirating music when spotify got easy and good enough to be a better deal... (well in point of fact I stopped when grooveshark got DMCA'd, but didn't feel the need to find an alternative given that spotify was just *there)-- and I'll stop pirating books when...
Okay, maybe you have a tiny point. TBH the cause is probably at least somewhat bidirectional. But while I acknowledge that I'm getting into bravery debate here... I feel like the impact of the pressures on men are dramatically underestimated compared to the impact of the pressures by men, when it comes to the publishing industry. (And maybe also in general but that is a way larger discussion that I have the time to have right now) As a baseline estimate, since we see much more comparable reading rates for younger vs older children...
ref-- https://www.theguardian.com/education/2026/feb/22/teenage-boys-reading-books-research?CMP=share_btn_url
1.4x vs 1.8x
I would guess that at least half of those boys are "lost" because of an insufficient supply of books. If the proportion at age 14-16 was 1.6x, we would see ~11% of boys reading. That doesn't sound like much, but that's 10% more male readers! And we should expect that this effect is actually cumulative given decreased rates of reading with age. Given the relationship between reading ability, educational attainment, and professional success, this difference in reading ability likely has massive downstream effects on the total number of men making it through to elite positions. Correcting that deficit is the opposite of a "waste of time." We could have-- at minimum, at an estimate-- a minimum of 10% more male doctors, lawyers, and engineers just by making sure more male-oriented books are published and promoted. Even ignoring the negative effects of the disparity between male and female achievement, the absolute effects of so many missing elites is likely to be significant and negative.
(Unless you believe AI will solve everything, but that's a fully general argument for not caring about anything.)
Sorry, but for middle-grade and young-adult boys, this supply-side argument just isn't empirically true.
Scholastic is a behemoth juvenile-lit publisher who sends their direct-marketing book fliers home with schoolkids and hosts annual book fairs at elementary and middle schools all over the USA. Here is their catalog for ages 13+. Skim it and you'll see whole rafts of titles obviously trying to catch the interest of teen boys:
Maybe it's not your personal ideal Naruto/ MLP/ skills-progression/ harem-porn cocktail, but at this level there's no shortage of publishing executives asking what boys like (fighting, adventure, videogames, skills, gore, comedy) and desperately trying to give it to them. Meanwhile, based on what I see around me, the tween boys are off binging MrBeast brainrot and disturbing TikTok AI porn, have minimal attention spans, and will not be enticed to pick up a book by any number of explosions on the cover.
Your argument is essentially that since you saw a panda in a zoo, pandas must not actually be endangered. "Boy books exist" does not disprove "there are fewer boy books." In particular, the paucity of male editors, agents, bookstore owners, and librarians mean that even the boy books that do get selected tend to be selected for acquisition or display get selected by people with a less discerning taste for what makes books interesting to boys. It's like the difference between the kind of comic book a grandma would buy for a little boy as opposed to the kind of comic book that little boy would buy for himself. Brainrot, poor attention spans, and tiktok thirst traps also afflict girls-- but the relatively higher quantity and quality of books available to them make them more likely to read anyway.
Whoah, that's sounding awfully like an argument for... representation? I'll admit, finding a full-throated defense of 50:50 gender quotas and #ownvoices on the was not on my Motte bingo card for the day. Nice that this place can still surprise me.
It unironically and unabashedly is (though unfortunately I don't think your downvoters recognized that.) Being represented in works of media is an important factor in making groups of people interested in said media, especially when the people in those groups do have some deep identification with the group identity. Wokism misunderstands representation as meaning that every group (excluding straight white cis and/or males) should be represented in every work, and that's a critical error. Similarly, there's also a lot of ignorance about what's actually being represented, and how important different kinds of representation are to different groups, but the idea isn't totally wrong at its core.
Well, hey, cool! Kudos on your self-awareness, it's an interesting set of views.
I'm curious how a right-leaning identitarian/ equity-and-inclusion focus squares itself with some of the standard critiques from the right, though. For example, you say:
But we should be clear that this isn't something left-identitarians believe for its own sake. Rather, it follows inevitably when you first accept the premise that it's right and natural for a person to reject otherwise-valuable activities (reading a book, taking a job, going to college) because of their subjective feelings of exclusion or lack-of-belonging when they feel unrepresented among too many non-identity-affiliates. An institution achieves perfect representation along one axis, then someone pipes up and says they feel the work doesn't speak to their group's concerns, so you put some of that group in, and before you know it, you have "every group represented in every work."
But as I understand it, you also endorse that premise? You're arguing it's understandable when boys don't read, and that this is not their fault, but rather is the fault of too much female-ness/ not enough vapid-big-titty-schoolgirls in books- so it's the job of publishers to remove this female-ness, and NOT the job of intelligent boys to find other axes besides gender/sexual desire along which to connect with literature. This is in keeping with the standard identitarian view that fiction is a mirror, not a window- that is, we read books to flatter our feelings and affirm our existing worldviews, not to better understand other people or learn about different spheres of human experience.
But also, you actually seem to be endorsing a far stronger version of this premise than most left-identitarians in publishing would. They might agree that fiction-as-mirror means that readers deserve a relatable own-identity-aligned character or two in most works to keep them engaged, plus some books in the catalog with own-identity-aligned protagonists, plus preference for the authors who write identity-group-X to also be from identity-group-X ("own voices"). But when I listed many books in the Scholastic catalog that satisfied these exact criteria for your identity group, being male-authored, deliberately tuned to male-only thematic interests, and featuring not just male protagonists but also mostly-to-all-male secondary characters, you argued that this is still not enough for equity and inclusion, because although men wrote this for men, about male interests, and many Scholastic execs are also men, there were presumably women in the pipeline somewhere ("chosen by grandma"), which makes it understandable that boys wouldn't want to read those books and shouldn't be expected to.
You can see how that would get pretty extreme if impartially applied across identity groups, right? Your "grandma" claim says that for your group to engage, there should be be no critical mass of non-co-idents anywhere in the mainstream publishing pipeline, primarily because non-co-idents don't really understand your identity group's experience, secondarily because they might block content that your identity group enjoys because it comfortingly runs down other identity groups as inherently stupid, inferior and exploitation-worthy.
Your preferred identity axis is biological sex, but that's based on your own feelings: someone else might feel more attuned to ethnicity, immigrant status, gender-nonconformity, class, disability, religion, etc. Arguing from your very high standards for equity and inclusion, how would you operationalize this in fairness across all those identity categories, for which people feel the same deep feelings of interest/disinterest and acceptance/rejection that you feel around your male sex? Again, you've argued not just that there should be some representation of your identity in authors/ characters/ protagonists, but that fiction is disqualified by any involvement of your enemy identity group(s), and indeed must feature substantial content demeaning them in order to catch your interest. That's a pretty tall order if you're applying it evenly across groups.
In broader terms, though, I'm also curious: if we're going with the identitarian "fiction= mirror" and the main purpose of reading really is to stroke our ego, bathe us in wish-fulfillment fantasies of power, accomplishment and sexual desirability, demean our enemies and validate our worldviews, all in the easy familiar language of our Present Moment - then what do you see as the prosocial value in reading? You seem to think it's a loss to society if some group chooses not to read, but also it sounds like you want books to leave us just as they found us, except maybe a bit more self-centered. So why do you care?
So I think you're overapplying your own understanding of why leftists want representation because I was referring less to all the academic concepts of why representation is good/useful and more to what I understood to be the most defensible version of the argument. That being, narrowly, that people re more likely to enjoy and therefore engage with works of media where they can see aspects of themselves represented.
(this is my bad for not being more specific, sorry.)
And to be clear, I'm also not applying this concept of representation normatively. I'm not saying that representation is good or bad, I'm neither claiming nor disclaiming a moral right to reject a book series based on its lack of big-titty schoolgirls. I am making a descriptive assessment that there is a lack of representation for males (1) within newly-released novels and (2) relative to the amount of space allocated for male-targeted books on store shelves. I furthermore diagnose the cause of that lack of representation as being due to the lack of representation of males (3) within the publishing industry. I do make a normative assessment about whether male literacy/novel-reading is a good thing, and to the degree that I believe it is a good thing I propose measures to remedy a lack of it by addressing (1) and (3). But you should understand those recommendations as instrumental measures, not moral imperatives. So with reference to your question:
To the degree that we can benefit as a society by encouraging literacy in specific identity categories, we should recommend interventions to promote literacy... based on the relative cost of the intervention compared against the expected benefit. I think the interventions I propose to start making up the gap between male and female literacy should be fairly cheap and affect a large proportion of the population. I think, on the other hand, forcing every single movie to include mixed-race professional sheep wool stylists would have a cost out of proportion to its benefits.
And with reference to--
This is a clear strawman of my position. I think reading can, does, and should stroke egoes and fantasies... not an an terminal goal, but as an instrumental step towards getting them to read better books that help them grow as people. (And also as a way to displace even more unhealthy, ego-stroking forms of media consumption.) Refer to my original post:
Also, elsewhere I make the argument that reading anything increases reading comprehension skills, which are linked to educational and professional attainment and therefore something we want to positively promote... even if the means to do so have unsavory light novel titles about horny sisters and taking gigarevenge for small slights.
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And before someone argues "sure, but all those boys' books are stupid, formulaic and terrible," well, the girls' books very much are, too.
Meanwhile, I miss when people of either sex read books for some reason other than pure embarrassing wish-fulfillment, jack-off material, or TV fandom. And when every book didn't need to have pictures.
The girls' books seem stupid, formulaic, and terrible in a way that appeals to girls' interests, in a way that boys' books aren't. That's the interesting question here, why book publishers, despite their monetary incentives, seem immensely terrible at appealing to boys in a way that they aren't when it comes to appealing to girls. Why is it that they're publishing the kinds of stuff directed at boys that they are now and declaring that they've tried and just lack the ability to force boys to read, instead of analyzing whatever underlying assumptions and ideologies that are directing them towards making bad decisions when it comes to publishing books that are stupid, formulaic, and terrible in a way that appeals to boys, like they're successfully doing for girls now?
Girls' reading has dropped off dramatically, too; boys just had a shorter distance to fall. I know "F@#$g girlbosses" are the preferred explanation for many ills hereabouts, but for anyone who's hung out with elementary schoolers recently, it's so obviously the screens in this case that I don't think Ockham's razor supports any more elaborate explanation.
Citation needed, so here's a 2025 study that captures some of the key gender differences: in kids 0-8, 59% of girls read or were read to daily vs. 50% of boys, but for both populations the figure is falling steadily over time.
By contrast, parental reports of screen use showed boys spent 25% more daily time on screens than girls. They spent 50% more time gaming (especially console gaming), as well as substantially more time watching online videos.
Table 10 in that study gives useful insights into what would appeal to boys. It shows that boys and girls have similar YouTube viewing patterns, except for the categories of streaming videogame commentary and prank videos, both of which little boys spend far more daily time consuming. This is by parental report, so likely a large underestimate given how often kids (and boys especially!) sneak YouTube time on phones or school computers without their parents' knowledge.
Have you ever seen any of those brainrot prank videos that little boys gravitate toward, on channels like Brent Rivera's? I was subjected to some secondhand, recently, as I glanced over the shoulder of a ~9-year-old little boy who binge-watched for three straight hours on his ipad while his dad was emailing. (This was in travel circumstances where once kids might have turned to a book.) The videos are aggressively, mind-numbingly high-intensity, emotive and anti-thought. Jump cuts multiple times per second! Bright colors and Punch-and-Judy-level plots! Constant threat and edgy cruelty, telegraphed by actors who grimaced and mugged cartoonishly through their roles, with constant fantasy slapstick to confuse and perplex. Bonus vague undercurrents of disturbing sexuality (Brent apparently feels up his sister a bunch) to seamlessly transition the kids to phone porn when they hit 10 or 11.
I felt trippy and mentally fried after about 5 minutes of that stuff. I can't imagine what it would do to a young person's brain to spend hours per day at that level of passive stimulation during sensitive developmental windows from toddlerhood onward. Verbal ability also builds on itself, so kids who read just a bit less will fall farther behind in reading comprehension and stamina with each passing year.
If you honestly think it's those publishing Karens' fault that this boy didn't read, I'd be curious to hear exactly what print stories you think would compare favorably in attention-grabbing qualities to Brent Rivera or Five Nights at Freddy's. I suspect the Karens would love to know, as well.
Hard to say, but behavior by the "Karens" in other fictional media industries such as film, TV, and video games suggests that these Karens would prefer not to find out, even if it means paying a hefty financial penalty.
I'd say that a good start might be trying to appeal to boys by figuring out what appeals to them in literature by e.g. looking where there is a higher proportion of boys reading, such as, e.g. comic books (the actually successful ones from yesteryear) or visual novels or even light novels, and see what those have in common. I think one core part that would likely help is to make sure that the fiction specifically flouts ideals, concepts, principles, and such, of whatever name we're putting on the cluster of ideologies around feminism today. A lot of the male-successful VNs and LNs seem to have a significant wish-fulfillment portion, which, to young men, would certainly require things that would make the typical standard-issue liberal feminist at least cringe, if not faint; as such, a publisher aiming to appeal to young male readers ought to at least consider, if not prioritize, making literature that specifically offends their editors.
I also suspect that nerdy scifi or tech-oriented military thrillers like the stuff by Crichton and Clancy of yesteryear could find a decent male audience, though, like all literature, it's likely far less popular in 2026 than 1996. And it seems vanishingly unlikely that someone who's not a male autist or autist-adjacent could or would want to write a good book like that; as such, if the publishers made sure not to discriminate against males and possibly even sought out autists or autist-adjacents, with bonus points if their writings seemed to condone ideologies that would make their median editor ragequit and call for a boycott of the publisher, then that might also be a good step.
Yes, as I said, I'm aware that's the one-size-fits-all prescription hereabouts. Similarly, I bet the tankies think flouting capitalism would solve the reading crisis and the NIMBYs think stricter zoning couldn't hurt. To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
But the claim that little Jaden with the slack jaw and glazed eyes would totally click away from his sixtieth Dhar Mann video and dive into thick books if only the mean editor ladies... what, put more vapid big-titty schoolgirls in there? I think you're going to need a proposed mechanism for that. The internet is already chockablock with vapid big-titty schoolgirls, many of whom you can apparently watch getting excitingly choked and butt-fucked while their big titties bounce around in crystal-clear high-def. What's the competing attraction of a paragraph of tepid prose description that forces you to exhaustingly imagine the titties yourself based on a lot of words whose meanings you don't know?
As you pointed out, there's lots of media out there that's already consumed enthusiastically by boys and men. Versus traditional prose novels, all of those other media genres are notable for dispensing much higher levels of stimulation while making much lighter demands on abstract thinking, verbal reasoning, long-term focus and complex emotional processing. If a group, left to itself, preferentially consumes media that's mostly pictures with few words, media that features fast-moving objects, physical conflicts, bright colors and flashing lights, media with cartoonish characters based on familiar TV/film/game IP and predictable wish-fulfillment plots, media with exaggerated visual depictions of receptive sexual targets, then that's what I'd call an extremely obvious revealed preference for not prose literary fiction. Which is fine, but again, what's your model for "just mix in a little cartoony comic-book fanservice porn and maybe they'll rush back to novels"? Why would they be likelier to take the medicine with a spoonful of sugar, when they can already just eat the sugar straight?
Things work in tendencies and on the margins. I thought that would be common sense for anyone here. If literature is marginally more entertaining to young males than they are now, then the boys for whom not-books was one epsilon more entertaining than books will shift over, this causing a higher proportion of boys to read. This is baseline for how ALL population-wide phenomena of personal choices works.
The fact that there are boys right now who read for fun and balance reading and video games for fun is about as strong proof as possible that there are boys on these margins. Resorting to some argument from personal incredulity of some version of "X can't POSSIBLY be made to tear kids away from Y due to A, B, C" when we currently see current versions of X doing just that - just to a lesser extent than would be equal - is a way of conceding the argument entirely.
You make no point here, though. The point is that when you see a metal object with a flat head and a pointy end in a box that says "nails" on it, then you can most likely accurately call it a nail. The ideology in question has overtly taken over literature and other fictional media with the explicit intention of appealing more to females and less to males. Maybe they're so incompetent that all their efforts have no effect, but certainly just turning off their explicit pushing-away-males strategy is something one ought to consider when thinking about how to attract males.
More generally, if someone is failing to accomplish something, then the possibility of burning down whatever ideology got them there has to be considered a reasonable possibility. That this isn't one of the first thoughts to occur indicates a lack of desire to accomplish this. Which is also fine, but it's important to be clear that it's entirely due to a lack of desire, not due to a lack of ability (the ability might be lacking, but anyone who claims that we have meaningful evidence that it is is someone who hasn't been paying attention the last 20 years).
Some things do work by tendencies and on the margins, yes. Superstimuli and vices do not - or at least, not in that direction, and not at a scale that drives meaningful change.
Generations of do-gooders have thought as you do, and it always ends up in Ned-Flanders cringe. For instance, compare:
Oh no, since we installed the free Pop Tart machine, kids are eating nothing but Pop Tarts instead of their apples and broccoli! So I guess we should serve frosting-coated apples and broccoli, then a few kids will eat those on the margin.
Oh no, since we eliminated scheduled start times, everybody's sleeping in instead of going to work! So I guess we should dim the lights and get soft pillows for our chairs, then maybe on the margin people will choose to come to work.
Oh no, ever since our church community dissolved, kids are going to the club instead of coming to service! So I guess we should get a drum kit to jazz up our hymns a little bit, then on the margin the delinquents will come here."
Or, for that matter, consider every tubby middle-aged person who's ever bought a little second TV to put above the dusty home rowing machine, hoping that on the margin it'll make them choose exercise during evening Netflix.
Not how it works.
Right, and I am saying that just like the tankie's totalizing hatred of "capitalism" (by which he means partly that one asshole boss he hated, partly a media caricature of fat-cat cigar-chomping Gilded Age CEOs), the similarly vague tribalist loathing of "feminism" (=Twitter Karen memes plus that one insufferable lady in HR) is leading people to get the causal arrows very obviously twisted here.
To use another analogy: if CEO income has increased, and also homelessness has also increased around company headquarters, and both of those things make you sad and annoyed, that still does not mean that "capitalism" is the ideology that "got us there," or that CEO delenda est would restore any meaningful number of homeless guys to happy productive lives in tidy little cottages of their own.
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IMO there's plenty of supply if you know where to look, frankly way more supply that any human could engage with in a thousand lifetimes, between the classics, modern web fiction, and non-traditional mediums (narrative indie games, graphic novels, visual novels etc). If the claim is more narrow that there's a supply issue within modern traditional publishing then I agree, but it seems like neither male producers nor male consumers as a whole are particularly interested in filling the gap, so it seems like a bit of a dead end. I'm not convinced that specifically lack of modern traditionally published books is why boys are reading less, when there's so much else available to read for those interested.
Those are some interesting stats, but I'm not convinced that less boys reading is causal to reduced male educational / professional success (although it does seem likely that there are other factors of modernity causal of both less reading and less success).
The era where every upper-middle class man received a traditional liberal arts education and was conversant in the classics is decades past; nowadays your doctor's favorite movie is the Avengers and your lawyer plays Fifa in the one hour free he has every week to unwind. The pressures behind competitive careers nowadays don't really align with developing literary taste; I've had much more interesting intellectual conversations with underemployed third-world internet anons compared to the vast majority of the magnet school strivers that I went to school with. I'm not convinced that more reading would lead to more men in elite positions at all.
The operative words in your post are
That is a very high barrier to entry, and one I think you are inches away from recognizing given your later comments about marvel doctors and fifa lawyers. Men have to take an active and concerted effort to find fiction written for them, much less high quality fiction. Goodreads has an abysmally shit book recommendation system and its top-lists are all voted on overwhelmingly by women. Fanfiction sites are full up on sludge written by middle schoolers and without deep knowledge of which fandoms to read and what tags to look for you will find yourself running into works that may initially seem compelling but invariably devolve into fluff/romance/angst slop. Royal road is... royal road.
In the meantime, women have booktok influencers and glistening werewolf abs on every supermarket shelf. Overabundance leads to interest leads to consumption leads to overabundance, in a virtuous cycle.
Yeah that's fair enough, I agree that booktok / romantasy slop is now aggressively marketed to women in a way that reading is no longer marketed to men.
Still, I'm not really convinced this is a problem per se; on an individual level there's plenty of avenues for men to read and write literature if they so desire, and on a societal level would we really be better off if the romantasy equivalent (Dungeon Crawler Carl?) was getting marketed aggressively to men?
For men who already have an established and voracious love of reading, maybe. For young boys, I think, not so much.
When reading books is causative of reading proficiency is causative of educational and professional attainment, absolutely.
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